Former priest Eugene Cullen Kennedy, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's close friend and biographer, likes to mock anyone and anything orthodox. Even yours truly has been a target of his leftist mockery and wrath.

From a recent blog post on the website of the National Catholic Reporter (excerpted; click here to read the entire post):

Once bestowed on the clergyman who best exemplified the worst of clerical behavior, the Monsignor Moron Award has been retired out of sensitivity to morons....

Here, then, is the All-American Clerical Culture Team. Its members do not really constitute a team because each one exhibits the hallmark of the classic cleric, the autocratic demand to call all the plays and get credit for all the scoring.

Skating onto the ice under the roving spotlights is our first nominee, Bishop Thomas Paprocki, newly appointed to Springfield, Illinois. Paprocki has been previously recognized with the Near Death Experience Award because few, if any, have ever died so to become a bishop. Bishop Paprocki once changed the seating cards at a Chicago Catholic Lawyers dinner so that Cardinal George would not sit next to the late County Board President, John Stroger, a Catholic who tolerated abortions at the large public Cook County Hospital. Attending to such details is like throwing roses in one's own path to the bishopric. Paprocki, famous for trying to explain what he meant when he claimed that the devil caused the sex abuse crisis, is a hockey player who allows himself to be called the 'Holy Goalie,' is said to display his Episcopal coat of arms and motto on his helmet. Springfield, can you drink of this Stanley Cup of a cleric now being passed to you?

Next up is Bishop Thomas Olmstead [sic] of Phoenix who may be paired mythologically with the late hanging judge Roy Bean who styled himself 'the Law west of the Pecos.' Olmstead [sic] is a nice man but in his recent excommunication of a hospital nun who, in tragic circumstances, allowed an abortion to proceed to save a young mother's life, he skipped any possible intermediate steps to employ the nuclear option of exiling a saintly woman from the Church and work she loves....

The Captain of the All-American Clerics is, by acclamation, Frank Dewane, formerly in the soft drink business, but now making a hard sell of fascist Catholicism as if he were the Doge of medieval Venice in Italy rather than just the bishop of Venice in Florida.... He has eliminated parish councils, ruled out women's participating in the liturgy in any way when he presides, assigned spy-like agents to make sure that his orders are carried out by pastors, some of whom he has imported from a religious order with which he has close ties and all of whom must subscribe to his view of Catholicism. Even parish bulletins must be cleared at the chancery. He has banned well-known Catholic speakers as 'dissidents,' a word that he uses like 'snow' to cover everything. Not only has he withdrawn from all inter-faith activities and fired even volunteer church workers suspected of being 'liberal.' While building a large home in a location he prefers to keep undisclosed he cut the Catholic Charities budget 'for financial reasons'.....

Why Kennedy even bothers to remain "in" the Church is somewhat of a mystery, although, when you think about it, if he were to do the "respectful" thing and join the Episcopalians — like Alberto Cutié has done — Kennedy would, in all likelihood, no longer get the attention (and money?) he's been receiving over the last couple of decades from the secular and leftist Catholic media. And that would be a huge sacrifice for him, perhaps even more so than the vow of celibacy he supposedly took many years ago before leaving the priesthood (after 22 years) to marry.

Regarding Bishop Olmsted, he did act appropriately, contrary to Kennedy's assertion. Click here to see Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin's recent blog post on the matter. (This "hard case" abortion story is exposing the true colors of the Catholic left — also known as the seamless garment Catholics — many of whom will say that abortion should not be outlawed because, gosh, there are times when abortion is actually necessary to save a woman's life, as this case "proves.")

As for Bishop Dewane, if he has indeed done all that Kennedy says he has, heck, I wouldn't mind him coming to Chicago!

One thing is certain: Kennedy has served his master well. We should all be so loyal.

Matt C. Abbott

Matt C. Abbott is a Catholic commentator with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication, media and theatre from Northeastern Illinois University. He also has an Associate in Applied Science degree in business management from Triton College. He's been interviewed on MSNBC, Bill Martinez Live, WOSU Radio in Ohio, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's 'Unsolved' podcast, WLS-TV (ABC) in Chicago, WMTV (NBC) and WISC-TV (CBS) in Madison, Wis., and has been quoted in The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He can be reached at mattcabbott@<NOSPAM>gmail.com.

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